Wireless data devices, such as the BlackBerry handheld device from RIM Corporation, have proliferated in recent years. The popularity of these devices is based on their ability to receive e-mail and other data remotely so that the user can always be “in touch” with the office.
Many of these devices have a “push” architecture that eliminates the hassles of the traditional “pull” devices, in which the user must periodically connect to an e-mail server to check for new messages, or click on an embedded Web link to receive data. In contrast, with a push device, e-mail messages and other data such as documents are automatically routed to the handheld device, without the active participation of the user.
In large corporate or government environments, there are typically multiple wireless gateway servers that allow for communication from networked-based applications to wireless data devices. A wireless data device is typically provisioned on only one of the multiple wireless gateway servers. The application software which pushes messages to the wireless data device must either know, or determine, which wireless gateway server to use in order to forward a message to a particular user's wireless data device.
However, due to network growth or management, the provisioning of the wireless data devices on a particular wireless gateway server may change, requiring the application software which pushes data to wireless devices to adjust accordingly. Currently, known wireless data device push applications require manual revisions to adjust for changes, which is time consuming and can introduce human error into the process.
Further, document viewing is a common function performed by users on wireless data devices. It is also common for e-mail senders to update or modify attachment documents, thereby causing the need for the sender to resend another e-mail with the updated/modified attachment. It then becomes the responsibility of the wireless device owner to delete the original e-mail with the corresponding attachment to avoid having multiple versions of documents on the wireless device.
In order to assure that a wireless data device user has the most recent version of a document within an organization, users currently have to have a bookmark on each of the individual wireless data devices that linked to a web server location somewhere in the location in order to get to the current information (i.e., to browse a page). However, if the user is out of coverage area, then the browser would not be available. Or as in an example where an emergency contact list is needed, the servers may be down due to a disaster. And if the user is relying on having e-mails sent each time the emergency contact list is updated, the contacts may be out of sync.
Based on the foregoing, there is a need for a system and method for automatically adjusting for changes in the mapping/provisioning of wireless data devices to wireless gateway servers and for facilitating the automatic pushing of documents to the wireless data devices.